Date: Tue, 9 Dec 1997 10:59:10 -0500 (EST) From: "David E. Cross" <dec@phoenix.its.rpi.edu> To: "J. Weatherbee - Senior Systems Architect" <jamil@acroal.com> Cc: Andrew Atrens <atrens@nortel.ca>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: dealing with zombies Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971209105628.402A-100000@phoenix.its.rpi.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971208124226.4982A-100000@acroal.com>
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On Mon, 8 Dec 1997, J. Weatherbee - Senior Systems Architect wrote: > > As I recall under linux setting up a signal handler that excutes waitpid() > is not necessary if you are set (by default) to ignore SIGCHLD. I believe that is true under POSIX. > On 8 Dec 1997, Andrew Atrens wrote: > > > Hi All, > > > > I'm eval'ing Wordperfect-7.0-for-Linux on `FreeBSD 3.0-971012-SNAP' and am > > seeing lots of zombies: > > > > 1446 ?? Z 0:00.00 (xwpthes) > > 1460 ?? Z 0:00.00 (xwpgmk5) > > 1461 ?? Z 0:00.00 (xwpspell) > > 1462 ?? Z 0:00.00 (xwpspell) > > 1467 ?? Z 0:00.00 (wpp7) > > 1471 ?? Z 0:00.00 (xwpspell) > > 1472 ?? Z 0:00.00 (xwpspell) > > 1473 ?? Z 0:00.00 (xwpspell) > > 1513 ?? Z 0:00.00 (xwpthes) > > 1514 ?? Z 0:00.00 (xwpthes) > > 1531 ?? Z 0:00.00 (xwpthes) > > 1532 ?? Z 0:00.00 (xwpthes) > > 1533 ?? Z 0:00.00 (xwpthes) > > 1543 ?? Z 0:00.00 (xwpthes) > > 1551 ?? Z 0:00.00 (xwpthes) > > > > As I understand, the root cause is that (xwp) is failing to reap dead children. > > However, the children *do* get reaped when I exit xwp... it seems that > > as long as xwp is running, no reaping is done, and the zombies accumulate...:( > > > > What I'm wondering is: > > > > i. Is this a fault/feature of the app (xwp), the linux emulation code, or > > the kernel (in a larger sense), and > > ii. are there any *good* workarounds. ( I seem to recall some discussion about > > a tunable kernel parm for auto-reap or some such thing? ) What actually happens is when xwp exists the 'parent' process dies, this causes the PPID of the children to be set to '1' (init). init is always in a loop that reaps the exit code of all of its children. Since the orphaned xwp processes have been 'adopted' by init, all those procs go away. (Sorry if this has already been said... my net connection has been down since 1:00am.) -- David Cross
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